The Importance of Mindfulness in Bringing Balance to Your Systems

Regular Chiropractic Care and Mindfulness Practice

Many forms of mindfulness practice include meditation. Meditation has had numerous periods of unfoldment in the West, as represented most recently by Paramahansa Yogananda and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Zen meditation is another well-known form of practice, as exemplified in the writings of Shunryu Suzuki.

There is no "right" method of meditation. As in exercise, what works for you works for you. The key is to choose such a method and keep going, that is, be consistent in your meditation practice. When practicing meditation, people commonly experience psychological distractions. Uninvited thoughts suddenly appear in consciousness, distracting you from your main purpose. Similarly, uninvited aches and pains pop up, here, there, and seemingly everywhere, pulling your focus to the painful area and interfering with your quiet time.

By detecting and correcting sources of nerve interference and restoring balanced spinal alignment, regular chiropractic care helps to reduce and remove such aches and pains. By helping to optimize biomechanical function, regular chiropractic care assists you in getting the most out of your meditation practice and provides greater levels of health and well-being.

Mindfulness has become a very hot topic and is now consistently featured in mass media. This may be considered a good thing, as more and more of us allow ourselves to become distracted throughout the day by the never-ending onslaught of text messages, emails, and the pings of calendar reminders. Instead of turning off our phones, we persist in peering down at them, and our awareness of the world around us becomes dim and dimmer as the pull of our technological devices becomes ever stronger. The important solution to our loss of presence and control is the willingness to take on a mindfulness practice.

Mindfulness may be practiced in many forms, including breath awareness, guided imagery, and meditation. All methods are effective to the extent that we are consistent in our practice. A person may derive as much benefit from one form of mindfulness practice as from another, and one should trust one's instincts regarding the specific method with which to begin.

The primary benefit of mindfulness practice, of course, is the generation of awareness.1,2 It's so easy to let the hours of the day slip by without any real sense of what is occurring. By the time we get ready for bed, we often think, "where did the day go?" As days turn into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years, we may quickly have the experience of our lives slipping away, of losing control of the content and quality of our lives. The ongoing rush of the stream of time cannot be stopped, but we can subjectively slow things down dramatically by increasing our levels of awareness.

For example, when a Major League Baseball player is consistently seeing the ball well and spraying hits to all portions of the ballpark, his coach will say the player has "slowed the game down." The player himself will say, "when I'm in the groove, I feel like I can see the seams on the ball." Such an experience is that of heightened awareness. All of us have had the experience, after some sort of meaningful life event, that we were much more aware of the colors of the sky, trees, and flowers, and the songs of our neighborhood birds were much brighter and sweeter. At such times, we're able to notice, in great detail, the things that are actually going on all around us.3 For a brief while, our enjoyment of and participation in life becomes that much greater. We may even notice, regretfully, the loss of that expanded sense of being once it has faded away. Engaging in mindfulness practice is the key to obtaining and enhancing self-awareness. In this way, we are enabled to become healthier, happier, and more effective human beings.